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I'm one of the ones who has most to lose if this project ever got into serious trouble. I'm not even mildly concerned about how Josh Parnell is, or has, been conducting himself with regards to Limit Theory. Except for his stubborn refusal to answer straight, honest, pertinent questions.

He has stated for the record that he intends focusing on playability again this month. If it gives those who are calling for this some peace of mind, I'm happy. I would be equally as happy with anything else he chose to do which further advanced this project.

I don't think I will be overstepping the mark by saying you won't get to play it until he's happy with the state of the game. He may want to reclaim his life but this KS has bigger implications than just delivering Limit Theory.

If I happen to go missing for a while it's undoubtedly because I've been banned.

It might be worthwhile here to consider how game development often happens at the big studios.

You do a lot of pre-production design, and get started on your tool-building and asset pipelines. The publisher cuts you a check that looks huge. You hire a bunch of people.

Around the time you're really starting to make progress on implementing your foundational systems, a VP from the publisher shows up. After being shown the early character builds and environment/object assets, he (or she) declares that it all sounds good but it's missing a completely irrelevant and complex mechanic that he saw once in a completely dissimilar game. Also, E3 (or some other trade show) is coming up, and do you have a playable demo containing a full vertical slice of the game yet?

On being told no, the VP for Clueless Intrusion tells to to do it anyway or you won't get the next milestone payment you have to have to keep paying all the people you hired. Oh, and it can't delay the planned launch of the game for next Christmas.

The project plan has not yet been written that can cope with interrupts like this.

But you dutifully update your project plan, anyway, and redirect everybody to the new short-term goal. You know, and everybody else knows, that it will mean cutting some features from the game that actually ships if you're really going to hit that marketing- (not feature-) driven timeline, but you set that aside for now.

Everybody works insane hours to deliver a more-or-less working demo for the show that highlights some of the core features of the full game you want to make (including some mechanics you'd wanted to reveal later as part of your phased PR plan, but oh, well). It's sufficiently well-received that you get your next progress payment. You go back to working on the actual game.

One day, about the time your core systems are done and you're deep into content generation, you're summoned to see the publisher's CEO. You show him the game whose features you've been explaining consistently to his VPs for several months now. He nods, then casually expresses his opinion that your first-person parkour game would work better as a third-person game. (Note: this is exactly what happened to DICE when they showed what became Mirror's Edge to then-EA chief John Riccitiello.)

You narrowly escape having to entirely redesign your game, but you still have to crunch again to hit Marketing's timetable, and only at the cost of shrinking some of the levels and cutting several mechanics. The game launches to a media blitz, but is drowned out by other games vying for a share of the holiday game sales pie.

The game is immediately savaged by critics and gamers as an incomplete, buggy mess. If it was a sequel, you get emails to your private, personal account threatening the lives of your family because you "destroyed a once-great franchise." After a month, your entire team are fired (via an email sent by the same VP who wanted the E3 demo).

Now -- contrast that to Josh's situation. He is fully aware of the tension between finishing LT and making sure it has the features and polish it needs to substantially achieve its publicly defined design vision. As the sole developer, not beholden to the whims of any publisher's wallet, Josh is free to decide which individual features will best satisfy the goals of time and quality. Sometimes that's going to mean changing or adding things that weren't part of the big-picture plan.

That's not "lack of focus," it's flexibility of a kind that managers of publisher-funded games can only wish they had. I suggest that we should be thrilled that Josh is open to implementing features no one could have thought of any sooner that -- in his opinion -- add substantial value to the game. That IMO is more important than hitting a magic date in a planning document that's built entirely on estimates and guesses from the past.

I manage projects for a living. I know the value of hitting a schedule. I also know that Josh is working under different constraints than mine -- he's creating an entertainment product, which means greatness > immediacy. Make it great, and no one will care when it was released.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote:Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

That said, anyone that has read the dev logs and watched the updates will not be worried by this delay. The Boy has the stuff. There was always going to be some release date fun when creating something this sophisticated first time out. If this was a major studio game no-one would bat an eyelid, so my view is that Josh is simply the victim of his own openness and transparency when I see complaints about his time management etc.

I do have some sympathy for those recommending some time off, purely from the overall health point of view. Countless studies have shown that holidays are good for productivity and general well being. My bet is that a day off every two weeks would not impact Josh's overall deliverability but would help with keeping is life in order and help maintain his positive state of mind, especially during what is effectively a length crunch period. He's old enough to make this call himself though, so I'll leave it there.

In practical personal terms, this delay does mean that there's no need for me to upgrade my main machine (which I'm hanging on LT's release!). This is both positive (reduced cash outlay) and negative (no shiny! ). Still by early 2015 we may have a few new GPU releases, so that may be a nice sweetener.

mcsven wrote:
In practical personal terms, this delay does mean that there's no need for me to upgrade my main machine (which I'm hanging on LT's release!). This is both positive (reduced cash outlay) and negative (no shiny! ). Still by early 2015 we may have a few new GPU releases, so that may be a nice sweetener.

I am ready to upgrade but have been also holding off. I actually almost did. Even though I KNEW the mid-2014 was not going to happen, a small part of myself was hopeful.

mcsven wrote:
In practical personal terms, this delay does mean that there's no need for me to upgrade my main machine (which I'm hanging on LT's release!). This is both positive (reduced cash outlay) and negative (no shiny! ). Still by early 2015 we may have a few new GPU releases, so that may be a nice sweetener.

I am ready to upgrade but have been also holding off. I actually almost did. Even though I KNEW the mid-2014 was not going to happen, a small part of myself was hopeful.

All of this brings up another good point actually...

Now that the game has been delayed for a full year, would it be worthwhile to upgrade some of the minimum requirements? Technology changes fast, and still sticking by the "Will run on an Intel HD3000" might be a bit archaic at this point.

Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.

DWMagus wrote:
Now that the game has been delayed for a full year, would it be worthwhile to upgrade some of the minimum requirements? Technology changes fast, and still sticking by the "Will run on an Intel HD3000" might be a bit archaic at this point.

Well, we know it'll run on an Intel HD4000 series chip for certain, because that's what Josh's Mac has. So we can call that the minimum requirement for now.

DWMagus wrote:Now that the game has been delayed for a full year, would it be worthwhile to upgrade some of the minimum requirements? Technology changes fast, and still sticking by the "Will run on an Intel HD3000" might be a bit archaic at this point.

You know that'll exclude some people from playing LT when it's released, right?

Keep in mind that Josh basically promised it would run on the computers of people who had comparable machines. Changing it now would either force those people to upgrade, or ensure they wouldn't be able to run it. Besides, the specs he gave are pretty much average for a laptop from a year ago. Good example: my laptop is almost exactly as powerful as Josh's "minimum requirements" rig, and it was very average when I got it a year ago. 6 GB RAM, 2.1 Ghz quad core, medium-quality graphics card (actually a good graphics card for a laptop - a bit above average there). I don't think having a better-than-average-quality machine, or a desktop computer, should be a necessity. Especially since I'm theoretically able to run almost any game from the past few years on my laptop no problem. (systemrequirementslab is your friend.) If I could run Crysis 3, but not Limit Theory, something's not right. At that point I'd start worrying about better optimizing LT. I'd even be able to run games like Dark Souls on my rig at max graphics (given the right mods) and that's a horribly optimized PC port. (been doing research on Dark Souls recently, but that's a topic for another time.) For me to be able to run that, but not LT... well.

I really love that I'm in a community where everybody loves upgrading their master gaming rigs, but I don't think upping the minimum requirements is a good idea. Mr. Parnell aimed high to begin with. If we want to pack more in - that's awesome - that's great - I'm all for it! Let's do it! Let's have an Ultra High setting for graphics, or even a Ludicrously High graphics setting - let's send the maximum graphics quality through the roof! -but let's not bump up the minimum requirements. I'm fairly sure Mr. Parnell would love for his game to be accessible by everyone - or as many people as possible. Not everyone has the budget to upgrade their machine every few years, and relatively few people have gaming rigs.

Victor Tombs wrote:If I happen to go missing for a while it's undoubtedly because I've been banned.

My new computer budget for the next 18 months: $0.00 unless this one crashes. then its "what can I get at Walmart." A delay in buying a new one is always preferred. $800 computers, I can barely afford that... maybe. $1500 computers, I gawk like the poor student I am.

When you're trying to fill an infinite multiverse, if you're not willing to consider the entire creative output of humanity as a starting point, you're wasting your time.
User: JoshParnell is accountable for this user's actions.

mcsven wrote:I do have some sympathy for those recommending some time off, purely from the overall health point of view. Countless studies have shown that holidays are good for productivity and general well being. My bet is that a day off every two weeks would not impact Josh's overall deliverability but would help with keeping is life in order and help maintain his positive state of mind, especially during what is effectively a length crunch period. He's old enough to make this call himself though, so I'll leave it there.

Sometimes even grownups do need a reminder of what its actually good for them
Funny thing is, the day this topic came up Josh seemed to have taken a day of all by him self

Considering the Mininmum Requirements - I wonder how LT will handle all that Background Simulation (so not the actualy graphical and in Detail stuff going on around you, but the Universesimulation, i could imagine that after a while this will be quite Memory and Calculation Heavy, at least when you want to keep track on what has happenig in other Systems you allready visted (and their neighbours) and keep some consitency with the Layout and Existing Bases, Groups etc. in those Systems (other wise you just could scrap it to a hash + new random generation upon reentering + some random "Development" stuff from last time you visted) But somehow i could bet that this would lead to a "isolated" (as in onyl a few systems do really interact at all and the rest does happen in a way the player can not really understand, as it is not the (excact?) same rules he is following wiht his own development.
Has this been discussed somewhere before? If so, a link or somehting would be very nice.

Talvieno wrote:I really love that I'm in a community where everybody loves upgrading their master gaming rigs, but I don't think upping the minimum requirements is a good idea. Mr. Parnell aimed high to begin with. If we want to pack more in - that's awesome - that's great - I'm all for it! Let's do it! Let's have an Ultra High setting for graphics, or even a Ludicrously High graphics setting - let's send the maximum graphics quality through the roof! -but let's not bump up the minimum requirements. I'm fairly sure Mr. Parnell would love for his game to be accessible by everyone - or as many people as possible. Not everyone has the budget to upgrade their machine every few years, and relatively few people have gaming rigs.

How can anyone disagree with what you say here, Talvieno?

I want as many people to play Limit Theory as possible. Obviously, there has to be a minimum requirement but I would prefer it to remain at a level where impoverished students and the like, who don't have access to high end gaming laptops or rigs, can enjoy the experience of what will be a groundbreaking game. Josh is not unaware of the world in which we live so I am sure he will be doing his best to cater for those who don't have a snowballs chance in hell of playing games like Star Citizen.

Talvieno wrote: You're far too much of a gentleman for that to ever happen, I think.